Ivy League,’ Gina murmured in a swift aside to Katie. ‘That’s the equivalent of our Eton and Sandhurst cadets.’
Katie nodded. Her father’s pre-war career as the conductor of some of London’s most famous bands, and the fact that she had always accompanied him when he played, to help him with all the practical aspects of his work, meant that she had had enough contact with the upper classes and the well-to-do not to feel awkward or intimidated in the company of people from a social class above her own.
The young Americans might be inclined to be a little boastful and a little thoughtless about how a British girl might feel hearing them talking about how they were going to win the war, but Katie was wise enough to put their comments down to excitement and inexperience, although she noticed that Gina looked rather nettled, and so wasn’t surprised when her friend excused them both with the fib that they had to ‘catch up with some friends’.
‘I know they are our allies, but I hate it when they are so beastly about our boys,’ she told Katie crossly once they had escaped. ‘Talking like that about showing Hitler what real fighting men are and showing us a good time.’
‘I don’t think they meant any real harm,’ Katie tried to pacify her. ‘They’re only young and, unlike our boys, they don’t really know what war is all about yet.’ Unlike Luke. He knew what war was all about. Luke! Hadn’t she made herself a promise that she would not allow him into her thoughts?
‘I do wish you could fall in love with Eddie, Katie.’
Gina’s plaintive words made Katie smile.
‘Eddie doesn’t really want any girl to fall in love with him. He just wants to have a good time with lots of different girls.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Gina told her. ‘Eddie is a flirt, but he’s really keen on you, and I mean really keen. If you were to give him the least bit of encouragement, I suspect he’d have an engagement ring on your finger as fast as anything. He might be a flirt but you can be sure that he knows that he has a duty to provide an heir for the title.’
‘That’s nonsense and you know it. Eddie’s parents will expect him to marry a very different sort of girl from me, and someone from a similar background to his own.’
Katie said this without any feeling of resentment. In her opinion it was only natural, with Eddie’s father having a title, Eddie’s family should want him to marry someone who understood that sort of thing.
‘Once I dare say they would have done,’ Gina agreed, ‘but right now I think they’d just be glad to see him married. As I’ve just said, if anything were to happen to him, there’s no one to succeed him to the title, and there won’t be until he marries and has a son. Not that anyone can get Eddie to talk seriously about that. He maintains that nothing’s going to happen to him because he’s got Leonard to keep an eye on him.’
‘I like Eddie, Gina,’ Katie answered, ‘but that’s all. However, even if I loved him I don’t think we’d be right for one another. Our backgrounds are so very different. Now, whilst the war’s on, that kind of thing might not matter but once the war is over it will be different.’
She was an ordinary girl and whilst she had liked Eddie’s parents when she had met them at Gina’s wedding, and they had been kind to her, Katie knew that a life like Eddie’s mother’s, as the lady of the manor, was not one that she would ever want.
‘I hope them ruddy naval gunners know the difference between our own lines and them panzers,’ Andy told Luke breathlessly, both of them dropping flat to the ground as they heard a fresh burst of exploding tank shells.
It was two days since they’d come ashore at Salerno, followed by intense fighting with the Germans as they’d tried to push them back from their entrenched position. But now, with the panzers having moved down from the hills beyond Salerno to surround the bay, it was looking dangerously as though they were the ones who were going to be pushed back into the sea, not the Germans forced to give way so that the Allies could advance.
The naval guns to which Andy was referring, as the men dug in, belonged to the battle cruiser Warspite and three destroyers out in the bay, all of which were pounding the panzer-infested hills, whilst the panzers returned fire into the Allies’ lines.
‘Hellfire, that was close,’ Andy protested, cramming his helmet down onto his head and wriggling deeper into his foxhole as a shell exploded within yards of their position, sending up a spray of earth and stone to mingle with the blood of the men it had hit, whilst the field guns of the 146th Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery, positioned behind the infantry, tried their best to give the Germans a pounding. The smell of war was everywhere: blood, smoke, cordite, unwashed male flesh and khaki.
‘You know what I think of at times like this, what keeps me going?’ Andy confided to Luke.
Luke shook his head. He knew what, or rather who, he thought of. Katie. He thought of his mum and dad and his family, of course, but first and foremost he thought of Katie and how badly he had treated her. If he didn’t fight to live he would never get the chance to apologise to her. And he wanted to do that. He wanted to set the record straight and square things with her. There was no going back to what they had once shared, but he owed her that apology. It and Katie were on his conscience.
But what if he didn’t survive? What if he never did get the chance to tell her? Did he really want her to go through the rest of her life thinking badly of him, telling the chap she eventually married how badly he, Luke, had treated her?
‘What I think of is me mum’s Sunday roast dinners,’ he could hear Andy telling him wistfully. ‘Aye, and there’s no way I’m ever going to let any ruddy German stop me from tasting one of them again.’
Luke nodded. It was his duty, after all, as corporal to listen to his men and to put heart into them when they needed it, but his most private thoughts were still on Katie.
Katie. How was she going to know everything he wanted to tell her if he never made it home? Another burst of shells exploded around them.
He’d write to her, Luke decided. He’d write to her just as soon as he got the chance – if he got that chance.
‘Good weekend at home?’
‘Yes thanks, June,’ Lou fibbed.
‘I love being in ATA and I always think that I don’t miss my family until I get some leave and I go home,’ June told her. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how we sort of have two separate lives – the one we have here and the one we have with our families? My ma would go spare if she knew a quarter of the things we get up to. I don’t even smoke at home, never mind tell her about the near misses I’ve had flying.’
Lou smiled. In truth she was glad to be back at the base. Because she didn’t want to have to think about Sasha and how much her twin had changed? Lou’s forehead crinkled into a worried frown. She had tried to talk to Sash, hadn’t she, and more than once, but her twin had rejected every attempt Lou had made to bridge the gap between them.
In desperation, before she had left, when they’d been alone in their shared bedroom, Lou had grabbed
